“Do the honors, boys,” said the barkeeper,
placing glasses along the bar.

Each man filled his glass, and all looked at Whitey.

“Boys,” said Whitey, solemnly, “ef
the cap’en hed struck a nugget, good luck might
hev spiled him; ef he’d been chief of Black Hat,
or any other place, he might hev got shot. But
he’s made his mark, so nobody begrudges him,
an’ nobody can rub it out. So here’s
to ’the cap’en’s mark, a dead sure
thing.’ Bottoms up.”

The glasses were emptied in silence, and turned bottoms
uppermost on the bar.

The boys were slowly dispersing, when one, who was
strongly suspected of having been a Church member
remarked:

“He was took of a sudden, so he shouldn’t
be stuck up.”

Whitey turned to him, and replied, with some asperity:

“Young man, you’ll be lucky ef you’re
ever stuck up as high as the captain.”

And all the boys understood what Whitey meant.

CODAGO.

Two o’clock A.M. is supposed to be a popular
sleeping hour the world over, and as Flatfoot Bar
was a portion of the terrestrial sphere, it was but
natural to expect its denizens to be in bed at that
hour.

Yet, on a certain morning twenty years ago, when there
was neither sickness nor a fashionable entertainment
to excuse irregular hours in camp, a bright light
streamed from the only window of Chagres Charley’s
residence at Flatfoot Bar, and inside of the walls
of Chagres Charley’s domicile were half a dozen
miners engaged in earnest conversation.

Flatfoot Bar had never formally elected a town committee,
for the half-dozen men aforesaid had long ago modestly
assumed the duties and responsibilities of city fathers,
and so judicious had been their conduct, that no one
had ever expressed a desire for a change in the government.

The six men, in half a dozen different positions,
surrounded Chagres Charley’s fire, and gazed
into it as intently as if they were fire-worshipers
awaiting the utterances of a salamanderish oracle.

But the doughty Puritans of Cromwell’s time,
while they trusted in God, carefully protected their
powder from moisture, and the devout Mohammedan, to
this day, ties up his camel at night before committing
it to the keeping of the higher powers; so it was
but natural that the anxious ones at Flatfoot Bar
vigorously ventilated their own ideas while they longed
for light and knowledge.

“They ain’t ornaments to camp, no way
you can fix it, them Greasers ain’t,”
said a tall miner, bestowing an effective kick upon
a stick of firewood, which had departed a short distance
from his neighbors.

“Mississip’s right, fellers,” said
the host. “They ain’t got the slightest
idee of the duties of citizens. They show themselves
down to the saloon, to be sure, an’ I never
seed one of ’em a-waterin.’ his liquor;
but when you’ve sed that, you’ve sed ev’rythin’.”